Celebrate World Backup Day! | Heart Internet Blog – Focusing on all aspects of the web

Today is World Backup Day, and what better way to celebrate than to back up your website?

Whether you have a single website or run several dedicated servers, backups are a vital part of any business. It protects you against hackers, server failures, data centre issues, or even accidentally writing over an important piece of text.

Someone sitting with a laptop on their lap

Backing up your hosting account

If you have one of our web hosting packages, the server your account is on is backed up as part of our standard policy, which means that if your server cluster goes down, we will have a version of your site that we can restore to. However, this can only be accessed if there are problems with the server, not if there are problems with your website.

But you can easily back up your website with our built-in website backup tool. This will back up all your website files (or all the files in a specific directory) into one convenient zip file. When you want to restore something, just upload the entire zip file again, or find the individual file you want to restore, and upload it via FTP or the File Manager.

To use our backup tool:

  1. Log into your eXtend Control Panel
  2. Click ‘Backup /Restore’
  3. Click ‘Create Full Backup’ to back up your entire site, or select a directory from the drop-down menu and click ‘Create Partial Backup’ to back up that directory
  4. A zip file will download onto your computer, containing your backup

The website backup tool will not back up your databases. But you can manage and back up your databases through the ‘MySQL Databases’ page in your eXtend Control Panel.

If you’re more technically advanced, and want to write your own backup script, you can also set up a cron job that will run your script at a time you specify. This is great if you want automatic backups that you don’t have to think about.

We have an article in our Support Database on it – How do I run scheduled tasks (cron jobs) in my account?

A black keyboard with a hand on it

Backing up your server

If you have a VPS or a dedicated server, you are responsible for your backups. You can choose to set up your own system of backups, or you can use Heart Internet’s backups, which are on a separate server cluster from your server.

Once you have the backup space, you can then mount it and use it. We have three Support Database articles focusing on using our backup space:

  • How do I mount the backup space on my VPS?
  • How do I automatically back up my data to my server’s backup drive using cPanel and WHM?
  • How do I automatically back up my data to my server’s backup drive using Plesk?

So back up your website today!

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